Inadvertently Baring Necessities

Although the name Disney is synonymous for some with timeless entertainment, “The Jungle Book” occupies a special place in Disney company history. Newly released on Blu-ray (as well as on DVD and digital HD), it was the last of the studio’s animated features to have been made under Walt Disney himself. That pop-culture titan died in December 1966, three years after work on the movie began and 10 months before its release.

Disney’s “The Jungle Book” hewed more closely to its source, Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, than the Korda brothers’ 1942 live-action version (a vehicle for the teenage star Sabu), but it was also a form of reverse colonization. The movie followed “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” “The Sword in the Stone,” “Mary Poppins” and the featurette “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree” as the studio’s fifth consecutive full or partial animation project based on a British children’s book. Even more than these precursors, Kipling’s tales of the man-cub Mowgli, an orphan raised by solicitous wolves in the wilds of India, were Americanized and Disneyfied.

Ten years after the foundling is discovered in the wild by his guardian angel, Bagheera the Panther (the British actor Sebastian Cabot, then playing a similar part as the butler in the sitcom “Family Affair”), Mowgli is obliged to leave the jungle lest he be devoured by the human-hating Shere Khan the Tiger (a droll George Sanders in his trademark role as a suavely purring villain). En route to civilization, Mowgli encounters a succession of colorful characters: Baloo the Bear (the big-band leader and radio personality Phil Harris); Kaa the Snake (the Disney veteran Sterling Holloway, then most recently the voice of Winnie the Pooh); Colonel Hathi the Elephant (the British music hall star J. Pat O’Malley); a foursome of vultures (one with a Beatles haircut and broad Liverpudlian accent); and King Louie of the Apes (the ebullient New Orleans swing shouter Louis Prima).

While the 1962 UPA animated musical “Gay Purr-ee,” featured the distinctive sounds of Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Hermione Gingold and others, “The Jungle Book” was Disney’s first personality-driven fully animated feature. Basically a series of one-on-one encounters, its Bildungsroman is set in a world of funny animals with showbiz voices. (Mowgli’s is pure Mickey Mouse Club; it belongs to Bruce Reitherman, the director Wolf Reitherman’s 11-year-old son, who also voiced Christopher Robin in “Winnie the Pooh.”). The California man-cub establishes his primacy over the other animals and then, with some ambivalence, rejoins the human race — transfixed by the sight and sound of a girl his own age (Darlene Carr, heard but not seen in “The Sound of Music”), singing a surprisingly mature paean to bourgeois domesticity while going for water at a well at the edge of the jungle.

Although some of the character animation is notable (and, in the case of the infinitely elastic Kaa, inspired) and the background drawings are an effective pastiche of Henri Rousseau’s lush, dreamlike forest landscapes, “The Jungle Book” lacks the graphic pizazz of “Pinocchio” or “Dumbo” or even Disney’s cartoon “Alice in Wonderland.” But then, animation is not the source of the movie’s enduring appeal.

I remember my surprise as a teenage cinephile on reading that Janis Joplin considered “The Jungle Book” the best movie of 1967. (What, not “Point Blank”?!) It would be some decades before I actually saw “The Jungle Book,” in the company of three grade schoolers, and grasped the hipster appeal embodied by the shambolic, jive-taking Baloo, described by the judgmental Bagheera as a “shiftless jungle bum,” and especially the scat-singing orangutan King Louie.

Where Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” aspired to the ahistorical, the Disney version is truly a product of its moment. The movie was in production during a period of escalating social transformation; the vulture who talks like a refugee from “A Hard Day’s Night” is not the only contemporary marker. Kaa, who hypnotizes his prey while singing “Trust in Me (The Python’s Song),” may be a prophetic parody of a psychedelic cult leader, but the movie’s most vivid scene — Mowgli’s being mugged and abducted by a pack of monkeys and brought to the urban ruin they inhabit — is something like a political cartoon.

The Disney studio of the 1960s was hardly as image conscious as it would become. A specter haunts the movie’s jungle slum in the form of the jovially menacing King Louie. As drums beat out an orgiastic rhythm, Prima — a white entertainer who sounds “black” — sings a song of blunt aspiration. “I Wan’na Be Like You (The Monkey Song)” asserts that “an ape like me can learn to be human, too!” The voice of third-world militancy or incipient black power, the orangutan demands his rights, not to mention the secret of “man’s red flower.” In Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” the monkeys only wanted to learn how to build their own huts to become human; in Disney’s, it would seem, they want to set the neighborhood aflame.

“The Jungle Book” was in production during a civil disturbance that raged for days only miles from Disneyland (and was identified with the slogan “Burn, baby, burn”). The movie appeared in theaters only months after similar convulsions shook Newark and Detroit. King Louie’s desire for the fire next time speaks to an upheaval far beyond the confines of Magic Kingdom. “The Jungle Book” may mean to burlesque this gonzo rebellion, but nothing in it has the animation of Louie’s number or the liberating energy — and that may be why Janis dug it.

COMING SOON

DIANA The doomed People’s Princess is sensitively inhabited by Naomi Watts in the German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s recounting of Diana’s last great love. “Anchored by Ms. Watts’s sympathetic performance, it humanizes the woman behind the smile, the helmet hair and the myth,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times in October. (eOne)

GRAVITY Alfonso Cuarón’s spectacular evocation of the astronaut Sandra Bullock lost in space needs to be seen in 3-D on the Imax screen to be fully appreciated. But here it is in Blu-ray 3-D, as well as on Blu-ray and DVD. “Much as ‘Gravity’ revels in the giddy, scary thrill of weightlessness, it is, finally, about the longing to be pulled back down onto the crowded, watery sphere where life is tedious, complicated, sad and possible,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times in October. (Warner Home Video)

KING OF THE HILL For his third feature, originally released in 1993, the versatile Steven Soderbergh adapted A. E. Hotchner’s compelling memoir of a boyhood disrupted by the chaos of the Great Depression. The dual-format box also includes Mr. Soderbergh’s fourth feature, “The Underneath” (1995), a remake of the classic noir “Criss Cross.” “With warmth, wit and none of the usual overlay of nostalgia, ‘King of the Hill’ presents the scary yet liberating precariousness of life on the edge,” Janet Maslin wrote in The Times in 1993. (Criterion)

NARCO CULTURA The documentary filmmaker Shaul Schwarz juxtaposes songs and performances that were inspired (and even commissioned) by Mexico’s drug lords with the bloody havoc the cartels have wreaked. “The content of these deceptively jolly guitar-and-accordion-based songs — performed by Edgar Quintero and his Mexican-American band Buknas de Culiacán — is hard to reconcile with their traditional Mexican flavor,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in November. (Docurama)

THE CINEMA OF JEAN ROLLIN: THE VAMPIRE COLLECTION Prized by connoisseurs of the outré, Jean Rollin’s erotic, eccentric, early-1970s horror films have been repackaged as a four-disc Blu-ray set. “With slightly higher budgets, a little more formal assurance and a much better press agent, Jean Rollin might have taken his place in the pantheon of French cineastes,” Dave Kehr suggested, reviewing five individually released titles for The Times in January 2012. “But then, we would not have these odd, awkward, strangely touching films.” (Redemption/Kino Lorber)

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